P.O.S.S.E.
“True the Vote, the right-wing organization that insisted it had evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, has told a Georgia judge that, in fact, it has no such evidence. Their claims provided the basis for the arguments about voter fraud highlighted in right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-15-2024
“Fairshake superPAC (funded by Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, and others [I47]) has just spent around $2 million of the $80 million in its war chest on attack ads against California Senate candidate, Democrat Katie Porter. The ad attacks Porter for receiving three contributions of $500, $2,000, and $2,900 from individuals who are executives at a pharmaceutical company, oil company, and bank (respectively), and claim she has received more than $100,000 in such contributions from “Big Pharma, Big Oil, and the Big Bank executives”. The irony of Big Crypto spending 20x this amount on an attack ad is, apparently, lost on them”
“Threads is massive, but its user base is lurkers and influencers. Like being in the audience of a Marvel movie, you may consume some professionally produced content, but you’re certainly not going to form any lasting memories. For the past year, Bluesky has been pure posters, locked in a room with each other, deprived of much of the dopamine that they need to maintain their frenetic energy. And Mastodon is a community of commenters and reply guys, decentralised to the point that it’s possible to have a nice chat, but difficult to discern a conversation arising from within”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/13/bluesky-twitter-jack-dorsey-social-network
“the reality is that most people running a company will break whatever rules they are able to get away with breaking. While Ray herself said she has left behind the guideline-violating tactics of her past, choosing instead to do as Google asks and make high-quality websites that will “make the internet a better place,” as she put it, that kind of moral standard can be a lot to ask of someone running a business.
“They want this wholesome thing, and I can understand that. That’d be neat,” said an SEO named Cade Lee. “But that’s maybe in a world where we don’t have money and greed and things, you know?”
https://www.theverge.com/features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results
“Ackman’s senior thesis, submitted in 1988, looked at how admissions quotas to limit the Jewish student population in the 1920s echoed what some saw as the unfair treatment of Asian Americans in the ’80s. Ackman concluded that Harvard was admitting more students from other minority groups simply because “it has been pressured to do so.” He also critiqued the idea that the university was primarily a place for the transfer of knowledge. The real purpose of a university, in a capitalist society, was “to distribute privilege,” Ackman wrote. “The question, ‘Who should go to college?’ should perhaps more appropriately become ‘Who is going to manage society?’”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/bill-ackman-war-harvard-mit-dei-claudine-gay.html
“Lincoln saw clearly that if we give up the principle of equality before the law, we have given up the whole game. We have admitted the principle that people are unequal and that some people are better than others. Once we have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, we have granted approval to the idea of rulers and ruled. At that point, all any of us can do is to hope that no one in power decides that we belong in one of the lesser groups”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-11-2024
“The topic of resale is also more complex. If you buy a movie as a physical DVD and then decide you’re finished with it, it’s perfectly legal to resell it as long as you don’t make copies. If you buy a movie as a digital download or as an item in your online library, it’s much more complicated, but resale is generally prohibited. Do you own something if you can’t resell it?”
https://www.citationneeded.news/we-need-to-talk-about-digital-ownership/
“The second thing I realized is that it might not be such a bad thing to have to apply a Turing test to everything I read, particularly in the more commercialized marketing-driven corners of the internet where AI text is most often deployed. The questions it made me ask were the sorts of questions I should be asking anyway: is this supported by facts, internally consistent, and original, or is it coasting on pleasant-sounding language and rehashing conventional wisdom?; how much human writing meets that standard?; how often am I reading with enough attention to notice? If this is the epistemic crisis AI-generated text is going to bring, maybe it’s a healthy one”
https://www.theverge.com/c/23194235/ai-fiction-writing-amazon-kindle-sudowrite-jasper
“The only thing required to be a grifter, inadvertently or not, is to have your presentation skills outstrip your technical skill”
“As Gloria Steinem once put it, “If feminism means anything, it means taking responsibility for ourselves. It is not ‘women as victims’ but women refusing to be victims.” The revelations of Me Too undercut that logic, showing that powerful men, protected by the institutions they dominated, could harm even the most capable and intelligent women. Age-gap discourse, which is aimed primarily at older men dating younger women, grew out of that movement’s concern with power differentials and with coercion and consent. But it also sits at odds with Me Too’s core ethos — “Believe women” — by raising an outcry on behalf of women who, by all available public accounts, have no complaints about their relationships. Even if they say they are happy, the age-gap critics don’t believe them”
https://www.thecut.com/article/age-gap-relationships-couples.html